


A Door Key

by imkerfuffled



Series: 25 Days of Ficlet Prompts [20]
Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Basically the fraction comics apartment transplanted into the mcu, Clint's apartment - Freeform, Gen, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:46:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4321905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“This is my family. I found it all on my own. It's little and broken, but still good. Yeah. Still good."</i><br/>-Lilo and Stitch</p><p>Natasha finds an unexpected home in Clint's neighbors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Door Key

**Author's Note:**

> Since you probably haven't scoured through the comics to discover every little thing there is to know about Clint's neighbors like I did to prepare for this fic, here's a recap:  
> Grills is Grills. He does the grill. Nuff said.  
> Simone is the lady with the kids who almost got evicted in the beginning.  
> Aimee is the pink haired lady. Her girlfriend appeared exactly once in the background of a panel in issue 6. We know absolutely nothing about her, but neither of them appeared to be wearing pants, so I think we can assume.  
> Deke is the black guy with the bat in the battle of Bed-Stuy.  
> Tito may not be Tito's name, but he's the long haired white guy with who helped Deke in the battle.  
> Mrs Petrova is the unnamed old lady who attacked Clint during the battle. I'd like to think she's actually p chill as long as you're not waging war against her son.  
> Madison is also unnamed in the comics, and appears once in the rooftop barbeque scene with her baby and again in bubble form in Lucky's issue.

A key is a simple enough thing: a slim piece of metal with strategic grooves carved in the side. Just a means of opening a door. But doors are more than physical, and this key unlocks more than one.

When Clint gave it to her, it was pure practicality. She could easily break into his apartment if needed, and had on occasion. Though, after Natasha climbed through his bathroom window once to escape Bed-Stuy’s resident mafia, only to find Clint wearing nothing but a fluffy purple bathrobe, they both decided it would be best if she could enter through the front door.

So he gave her a key to his apartment.

It wasn’t meant as a symbol of trust or an offer to crash on his couch whenever she felt like it. It wasn’t meant to usher in the next stage of their friendship. But that’s exactly what it became.

And it certainly wasn’t meant as an invitation into Clint’s eclectic little group of neighbors, but they welcomed her as one of their own anyway.

* * *

 

Natasha could hardly clear the lobby before running into someone with a friendly smile and time to chat. Some days the dogs yapped around her ankles begging for a scratch. Other days, Simone’s kids barreled into her on the stairs, before shouting a quick apology and racing by with their Fisherprice airplanes.

She usually climbed a few more flights before seeing someone else. Every time she reached the third floor, almost without fail, tottering old Mrs. Petrova poked her head out of her apartment with an offer of tea. At first, Natasha didn’t accept the invitations; she usually just went to Clint’s building for emergencies back then, but as time went on and she got to know the old lady better, she came to look forward to visiting her. Frequently now, Natasha showed up early just to hear her babble on in Russian about whatever was on her mind. Her dog, Mitzy, came up a lot. Her son less so, and Natasha got the sneaking suspicion he belonged to a gang. Petrova, she soon noticed, could talk and talk and talk and not say a thing about herself. She exuded an air of grandmotherly innocence, but underneath the veneer was a tough, weathered old matron who kept her liquor cabinet well stocked with Russian vodka. Natasha loved it.

On the days when Mrs. Petrova didn’t show, Natasha sometimes dropped by Madison’s apartment instead. The young single mom, with her hair swept to one side of her head and her pastel-themed interior decorations, acted like a born suburban housewife. She brought homemade cookies to every roof barbecue, volunteered endless hours at her daughter’s daycare center, and had invited Natasha out shopping with her friends on no less than three occasions, which Natasha had accepted twice now. This on top of attending night school for a teaching degree, fighting a messy custody battle with her now-ex boyfriend, and struggling to find time around work and classes to raise little Alisha. Natasha marveled at how she did it all and still maintained her sunny disposition on life, and the spy made sure to be available as a sympathetic ear or a babysitter, or just a friend to share gossip with, whenever she was needed.

If Madison was a suburban housewife at heart, her neighbor Tito was the living embodiment of the seventies, complete with a recovering drug addiction and a lava lamp in his living room. Not only did he wear his ginger hair and beard long (though he’d cut his mustache to a non-pedophilic length sometime in the mid-eighties, he said), he was also active in almost every political reform movement Natasha could name. She met him while babysitting Alisha; the toddler ran out into the hallway to pet Mitzy, just as Tito was struggling with an armful of sarcastic picket signs protesting animal abuse, and the two of them collided in the middle. As it turned out, he and Natasha had similar senses of humor, as well as unhealthy obsessions with crossword puzzles, and before long they could be found at rooftop barbeques sharing a newspaper and pencil—one working on the puzzle while the other made snarky comments about the latest political scandal.

Through Tito, she also met Aimee, who often went with her girlfriend to Tito’s protest rallies. When Natasha first saw the couple—Aimee with her tattoos, piercings, and bright pink hair, and her girlfriend with a black bob, leather jacket, and studded boots—her first thought was, _“These two should be in a rock band.”_ Sure enough, Aimee played the guitar, and her girlfriend was both lead singer and drummer for a band called _The Crap-Sacks._

“So named,” Aimee joked, “because we are sacks of crap.”

Despite their self-deprecating humor, _The Crap-Sacks_ were actually quite good (if lacking in funds), with such songs as, “I Stepped on a Lego: My Supervillain Origin Story,” “Hawkeye Sucks (We Love You, Clint),” and “WTF Is So Great About Tracksuits Anyway (alternatively titled ‘Go Away You Creeps: 20 Minutes of Death Metal Screaming’).” Their latest project involved rewriting old classical pieces for the pop punk genre, which not only introduced Natasha to the wonderful world of punk music, but also led to the three of them collaborating on “dramatically contrasting” dances for the songs once Natasha mentioned she knew ballet. Clint called them all nerds for getting so excited about it.

Aimee’s next door neighbor, Deke, was an architect and computer geek who _The Crap-Sacks_ enlisted to digitally edit their music, so Natasha soon became well acquainted with him as well. Soon, she started coming to Deke with all of her computer problems, much to Deke’s delight. Their conversations then mainly consisted of Natasha grumbling about prototype Stark tech (“You know, I’m _normally_ really good with technology, but _no,_ Tony Stark has to make even the simplest of things incomprehensible to anyone with less than three PhDs!”) and Deke marveling at how advanced everything was (“Alright, this technically isn’t on the market yet, so you can’t tell _anybody_ about it, Deke, but I just need to know how to get the call button back so I can tell Stark his new phone sucks.”)

By that time, she had accepted her first mall trip invitation from Madison, where she met Simone. Possibly the most hardworking, no-nonsense woman Natasha had ever met, she juggled two part-time jobs and a blog for single parents to care for her two kids. She had managed through, as she called it, “a whole lotta luck and a stubborn willingness to live in squalor for months after the divorce,” to land jobs that would allow her to work from home, so she could still be there for Matthew and Joseph instead of sending them off to daycare every day. One job, as an editor for an online newspaper, gave her the inspiration for her blog, which was now bringing in almost as much income as the other two jobs combined. For the other post she answered calls for a home appliance company as the voice on the other end of, “For more information, dial the number on your screen.” Her boss was racist, sexist, and grossly nationalistic, but he paid well to “combat outsourcing,” so she suffered his bigotry in silence. Natasha was sure she’d go crazy within two weeks in Simone’s shoes. The amount of personal sacrifices that woman had made for her kids (her sweet, adorable, angel kids) was inspiring even for someone who could never have children, and Natasha never hesitated to offer a hand when she could, whether by looking after her kids for a day or kicking some sense into her boss. (Simone never did take her up on that last one.)

Somehow, out of all of Clint’s neighbors, she met Grills last. Grills, the unfailingly loyal, unyieldingly stubborn glue that held their hodgepodge little group together. Grills, the sweet, caring little man who made the best burgers in the city. Natasha only met him after she started coming to the rooftop barbeques, but it felt like she’d known him for much longer. Clint assured her that he had that effect on everyone. Something about the ease with which he accepted her and made her feel welcome amongst the group made it impossible for Natasha to dislike him. They didn’t talk much outside of the cookouts, but something told her Grills would do almost anything for each and every person in the apartment, including her.

It took months for her to realize that she would do the same.

* * *

 

For the longest time, she couldn’t understand why Clint kept coming back to this run down, crumbly old place when his family lived so far away in a much nicer house. While he did go home to them at every chance he got and did his absolute best to schedule missions around any important dates in their lives, he always made a point to spend time here each month. Sometimes he would drop by for a few days between missions, or he’d purposely take cases in New York, so he could stay in Bed-Stuy. And even though he was away most of the time, his neighbors always welcomed him back like he’d never been gone.

Natasha understood why now. Because, just like Laura, and Cooper, and Lila were Clint’s family, so were these people. Grills, Simone and her kids, Deke, Aimee and her girlfriend, Tito, Madison and Alisha, even Mrs. Petrova.

And now, they were Natasha’s as well.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this one half done since before aou came out (hence I used the apartment, not the farm), and even though this is technically out of order with the rest of this hodgepodge series, I'm posting it now since it's been so outrageously long since I uploaded anything here and I'm starting to feel guilty


End file.
